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LAUNCH: Food

LAUNCH Food is a global open innovation program for innovators, entrepreneurs, or intrapreneurs with big ideas for improving health outcomes by enabling people to make healthy food choices.

How can we improve health outcomes by enabling people to make healthy food choices? In September, the LAUNCH team asked the world to answer that question. The LAUNCH Food challenge received 280 applications from 74 countries, and our panel of expert reviewers helped us choose the most promising innovations. Eleven Innovators were selected to participate in the LAUNCH Food program.

Joanna Kane-Potaka: From ICRISAT, Smart Food is a campaign to popularize food that is good for you, the planet, and the farmer-- starting with millets and sorghum.

Robert Oliver: The world-renowned chefwill lead Pacific Island Food Revolution, a health education initiative tailored to audiences in the Pacific Islands that includes a reality TV format, multimedia, and creation of a social movement.

Bruce Neal: FoodSwitch is a program that helps shoppers choose better foods, industry make healthier products, and government set effective policies.

Kirsty Bayliss: From Murdoch University, Breaking the Mould is a plasma-based treatment that extends the life of fresh produce by delaying mould growth.

Jeremy Fryer-Biggs: Evaptainers is a robust, efficient, and low-cost refrigeration solution powered by only water and sunlight.

In partnership with the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and a broad cross-sector network of key opinion leaders and industry players, LAUNCH is taking a people-centred approach to action across the whole of the food system. Our Food challenge was developed through consultation with industry, government, and civil society from the Pacific Islands, Australia, the United States, Europe, and beyond.

LAUNCH Food will showcase and support solutions with the potential to transform food systems and the behaviours they drive to promote health and prosperity for all people while respecting the planet’s resources.

In its first year, LAUNCH Food called for for supply- or demand-side innovations that will ultimately impact people’s food choices, whether in the home, market, street, restaurant, or community. With the help of the LAUNCH Food Network, LAUNCH has selected a portfolio of 12 innovators: 11 from the LAUNCH Food Challenge and one from the LAUNCH Legends Challenge.

AWARDS

Selected innovators had the opportunity to present their innovation to members of the LAUNCH network at the LAUNCH Food Forum in March 2017. The Forum was a facilitated multi-day event connecting innovators with investment partners, market leaders, and technical experts as well as philanthropic, NGO, and public sector actors committed to accelerating the adoption and scale of solutions.

LAUNCH Food innovators are currently being mentored by the LAUNCH Food network to scale their technical capabilities and increase the impact of their innovations. This includes one-on-one mentorship, access to market partners, and facilitated opportunities for investment with LAUNCH partners and others.

While this LAUNCH cycle does not offer a cash prize, the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s innovationXchange has allocated up to AUD $5 million to seed and scale some innovations sourced through LAUNCH Food.

EVALUATION CRITERIA

Applications were selected on the strength of:

Potential for improving health outcomes

Technical feasibility and practicality of use

Pathway to scale

Sustainability of the innovation/solution

Evidence of potential for application in lower-income and underserved communities and/or developing markets and countries

Strength of project team and leadership

LAUNCH is particularly motivated to support solutions that:

Promote inclusion, gender equality, and women’s empowerment

Are appropriate at the local level with the potential to scale regionally or globally

Offer the potential to impact impoverished, disenfranchised and other vulnerable populations in developing markets, even if this was not the original purpose of the innovation

Acknowledge that eating is fundamentally a human experience, at turns social, nurturing, cultural, and necessary for survival

Are mindful of the end consumer

Shift the drivers and incentives that promote current poor health outcomes

Promote the evolution of existing markets, or the development/expansion of new markets

ELIGIBILITY

LAUNCH believes good ideas can come from anywhere. Innovator submissions were invited from academics, companies (small or large), entrepreneurs, inventors, non profit organisations, research institutions, national laboratories, government agencies, social enterprises and funders. ‘Innovations’ may be at the stage of functional prototype up to market-ready solutions. Applicants ready to be supported by industry partners or ready to scale will receive the most benefit from the LAUNCH experience.